Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville; informelle Demokratie 1, Macht der Mehrheit;

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: Chapter 3
Informal democracy

37a Tocqueville approves of the formal democracy in America that gives effect to the sovereignty of the people. He praises the constitutional forms, conceived in all their calculated complexity by its founders, the simple, spontaneous form of the township brought to America by the Puritans, and the art of association that underlies them. These forms enable the people to govern themselves effectively and, as a result, to live sensibly and prosper economically. They make political liberty possible because they are political liberty, which is liberty in practice, not merely in theory. In governing themselves, the American people feel the pride that goes with being free, while making a success of democracy. (Fs)

Majority power

37b Yet Tocqueville sees there is an informal democracy more powerful than the formal one. Forms of association provide structure—both hierarchy and procedure—that enable people to work together—but these channels or enabling devices are also barriers that delay or obstacles that prevent the will of the people from getting its way immediately. They can bring frustrated, impatient pride instead of pride in accomplishment. In the second part of the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville announces a shift in his presentation from the principle or dogma of the sovereignty of the people (announced in chapter 4 of the first part) to its actual governing. The second part begins with the chapter title “How one can say strictly that in the United States the people govern.” He declares that “the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the people” have “no lasting obstacles” to their will. The people govern through a representative form of government, but they choose their representatives frequently, direct them, and keep them dependent. Moreover, “the people” refers not to a formal body never acting but to the majority that rules in their name. (Fs)

38a Informal democracy is just what the old, formal liberalism tried to forestall with the ideas of representation and separation of powers. Hobbes and Locke conceived of a formal democracy in the state of nature, but it had only a fleeting existence, if that, and its purpose was to legitimize a sovereign that would govern in the name of—that is, instead of—the people. Locke and Montesquieu, seeing that the people’s representatives might be unfaithful, worked out a formal separation of powers that would compel the government to check itself. And The Federalist perfected these two fundamental forms of free government, so that the American Constitution was entirely representative in every branch and the separated powers were set in a new, improved balance, together with a newly invented federalism. These measures were carefully designed to “refine and enlarge” the people’s will through elections, and if that did not happen, to provide “auxiliary precautions” to deal with a runaway government or an unruly people, installing the reason of the people to regulate its passions. (Fs) (notabene)

38b Tocqueville disagrees, and his “new kind” of liberalism abandons the hope of the old liberalism that a democratic beginning, in the state of nature, can avoid a democratic conclusion in the government that results. Liberal forms designed to keep the sovereign people under discipline will simply be overrun. To say that there will be no lasting obstacle to the people’s will implies that immediate whims may be curtailed ... but maybe not. It is an idea closer to Rousseau (one of Tocqueville’s acknowledged masters) than to the liberals whom Rousseau also criticized for their sophisticated stratagem of having the people be represented instead of ruled. But Tocqueville did not accept, and did not allude to, Rousseau’s proposal to substitute a new form of the social contract for liberal representative government. Whatever forms theorists offer, the democratic people will eventually do what it wants. (Fs)

39a Having asserted that the people strictly rule, Tocqueville moves to the informal instruments of its rule, and first to political parties. Parties are not properly speaking about ethnic identity (as we would say) but divisions over common interests affecting all groups equally. They are an evil inherent in free governments, he says, agreeing with the traditional disesteem for them, and they may be divided into great parties, parties of principle like the Federalists and the Jeffersonians, and small parties without ideas that are concerned only with holding office. Yet even small parties such as the Jacksonian Democrats at the time of Tocqueville’s visit to America have “secret instincts” that refer to the two great parties to be found in all free societies—the democratic instinct for extending the power of the people, and the aristocratic desire to restrain them. Informally, even in democracy, where the people are sovereign, there is a party that wants to restrict them, as if aristocracy even when discordant were irrepressible in human nature. (Fs)

39b The free press in America is a weapon of its parties and also an informal factor in the sovereignty of the people. Government by the people is government by their opinions, which they choose: the power of the press is to formulate the opinions that the people choose. This is the power of the enlightened, but in the United States there is no intellectual capital equivalent to Paris, and the enlightened are dispersed so that they cannot readily address the whole nation. The spirit of the journalist in America by contrast to France, where he has more power, is one of coarse attack, appeal to passion, avoidance of principle, and scandalous revelations. In sum, a free press is a mixture of goods and evils that has to be accepted as such, there being no tenable middle between a press completely free and one silenced and enslaved. (Fs)

40a Another feature of informal democracy, also a mix of good and bad, is the political association. Americans enjoy an extreme freedom of political association that is considered dangerous even among liberals in Europe. Yet it sometimes happens, Tocqueville says, that extreme freedom can correct the abuses of freedom. This does happen in America, where there is great tolerance of opposition, as in the nullification crisis of 1831 to which he alludes. But such action comes often at the cost of sacrificing independence of thinking within the association as it seeks a united front. Such associations do good because by seeking change they “weaken the moral empire of the majority,” yet by seeking the consent of the majority they also endorse its moral force. The sovereignty of the people implies the equal capacity of each and the moral force of all, but in fact it is the rule of the majority over each in the name of all. (Fs)